My Dad was only 56 when he died! Can you imagine?
But my mother as far as I know is still alive; I think she's pickled -mummified from all the alcohol & ciggarettes (Cools my god!) & her own stubborn meanness<<>>

I last saw my father the day the men walked on the moon for a brief time at my 1/2 sisters. He had a stroke that day but I was never told when I asked about him via my mother. She said he had moved to Hawaii but I found out almost 30 years later he had returned to the dinky Texas town of his youth & married his childhood sweetheart! that his mother had 'forbidden' him to marry. She died within 6 months & I guess he could not take anymore hurt so died too.

In the last few years I refound fmaily from my childhood including my 101yo Uncle that was with my Father the day he met my mother in a bar. He said my Father didn't really drink then, & he only drank beer in the years I knew him, but that my mother was already a hardcore drinker. She was in Kansas with all the gangsters + the War years as an excuse.
Now I am 58 & have been haveing serious health problems for 2 years. Besides my own destructive behavior in my 20s due to being taught by my mother that Partying was adulthood I have had to start looking at the fact that I was probably carried in vitro by a drunken slut!! She evidently had to be tracked down by my Father & dragged home to his mothers from New Orleans when he found out she was pregnant (he was a Marine -pacific Adjuntant so he was always traveling through out the Pacific War arena).

The only picture I have of them is their 'wedding pic' in a bar with ciggarettes lit. I stare at that picture & you can see that my mother has some extreme hurt already in her young eyes but that my father is excited about life. & I have 1pic of her & me when I was 9months. I stare & stare at that child that was So happy being alive so joyous & ache at the injuries that have happened to emotionally destroy that Joy.

I know that my mother received emotional injury to herself as a young woman, & I used to feel a lot more empathy for her. Also the years of being a 'divorcee' in the 50s with children was not kind. But damn it all There were Too many Abuses to even record that happened to her but to me as a child that had not a chance to know why. I really believed until I was 35 that all men beat all women in the home. My life had been that stepfather beats mom unconcious & takes refuge in molesting me. Then it was a series of 'boyfriends' that it would end up in someone being attacked in their drunkeness......

One of my mother's boyfriends offered to pay for me to go to Beauty College (so I could earn a living) & I thought she was 'selling' me to him!! True. I ran away form the town thinking I was being sold into white slavery....

Well I'll end this confession with what amazes me about normal people when they hear I have Not spoken to my mother in over 30 years; "You have to go see her- she's your mother!" WTF? No I don't have to see her. & what am I going to do go acost some old lady that has never told the truth, never known a truth bcz of her alcoholism, to give me answers to why she so misled me that my life had been a mess & cleaning up the messes!?!?!?!

Lately I constantly hear in my background noise the voice of this Psychiatrist that interviewed me for a Work Comp case years ago: He had started tearing while I had answered his questions & I asked him what was wrong. He said "It's my job to evaluate people & I can do so very quickly & it makes me cry to think that with yr intelligence you could have been Anything you wanted to be IF you had had decent parents!"

MY god; you mean I could have been a Veternarian (don't do that there's blood), a Lawyer (well you do like to talk(), a Biochemist (oh don't be silly), a great Hollywood Costumer (Oh Edith Head is the only one so you will never break in the buisness). My mothers advice was "Be a waitress; that way You will always be able to eat at least cz no one is ever going to want to marry you to save yr ass".

So can a chronically ill, health impaired (lungs probably from all that kool smoke), demoralized, nervous 58 year old woman pick herself up off the bottom floor & try again??????

I kind of know how you feel. After my parents divorced, my dad dated women who took advantage of him all the time. It made me feel like I was the parent and he the kid. He'd call me up crying when a woman had hurt him.